We examine in discrete time the management of a flow pollutant that causes damage when it crosses a fixed but unknown threshold. The manager sequentially chooses a pollution level that allows learning about the threshold, thereby improving future decisions. If crossed, damage can be reversed at...

Unintentional introductions of nonindigenous plants, animals, and microbes cause significant ecological and agricultural crop damage worldwide. Trade in both manufactured and agricultural goods is a primary vector for such introductions. Fusing simple models of trade and biological...

The conservation of biodiversity is a major environmental issue, one that promises to remain at or near the top of the environmental agenda for the foreseeable future. The loss of biodiversity affects human welfare as well as being lamentable for its own sake. Humans depend on natural systems to...

We characterize the optimal harvest of a renewable resource in a generalized stochastic spatially explicit model. Despite the complexity of the model, we are able to obtain sharp analytical results. We find that the optimal harvest rule in general depends upon dispersal patterns of the resource...